The Register - Data Centre: Storage

Biting the hand that feeds IT

Cold-water time for fancy pants players

Analysis The enterprise storage market is in a period of data growth according to IDC-forcasted zettabyte heaven, right? Er, no, because it's it entered a recessionary period, with negative growth. Says IDC.…

Bill Moore is no more team as Emerging Technologies loses another top exec

Fat helium spinners and fast and fat flash stores

Western Digital Corp wowed analysts with exec spiel and five – or was it six? – product announcements. We have helium gas-filled drives, a 3D TLC NAND microSD card, two SSDs and a promised furiously fast flash platform array overflowing with IOPS.…

Astride both sides of data centre startup line

Sysadmin Blog I have met the enemy, and he is me. I stand astride a line. On one side I am an "IT decision-maker", on the other an "evangelist" for some startups I truly believe in. This year, I have learned a lot more about how the data centre sausage is truly made.…

Cheap US power costs a quarter of Japanese electricity

Case study Yahoo! Japan has teamed up with DDN Storage and IBM Japan to help it avoid the country's relatively high electricity costs – and run a disaster-recovery backup site on another continent for an earthquake rocks the nation.…

Viking raider's longboat filled with erasure codes

AnalysisMemoscale is a 6-person Norwegian startup, based in Trondheim, that has developed its own erasure coding (EC) technology. It says it's more efficient than classic erasure coding because it needs fewer hardware resources to run and enables higher storage capacity utilization.…

Says virtual NVMe-based SAN beats shared NVMe drive aaray

Interview Storage startup Excelero is supportive of NVMe drives and of NVMe over fabrics-style networking. It has a unique way of using NVMe drives to create a virtual SAN accessed by RDMA. An upcoming NASA Ames case study will describe how its NVMesh technology works in more detail.…

Tune into SuperMicro, Microsoft and Intel webinar explainer, Dec 6

Promo Listen to the tech pundits and they will tell you that storage is no longer the bottleneck in your system performance. Or to be more precise, storage does not have to be a bottleneck anymore - so long as you adopt NVM Express (NVMe) the next generation specification for accessing non-volatile memory such as flash. And then you need to be able to implement the technology properly.…

HC 250? HC 380? What are they actually for?

Analysis HP has two hyper-converged systems for two different but overlapping markets – SMB, ROBO, and LOB at the low end, and LOB/data centre at the high end. Both the HC 250 and HC 380 are based on ProLiant server hardware and have different software environments layered on the common Store Virtual SAN. Their branding seems the opposite of what one might expect, though.…

EOL for hyper-converged, rack-scale, turnkey turkey

Adoption starts in 2017 and will be leading flash interface protocol by 2019

+Comment At a high level, Pure believes NVMe is poised to unlock the next generation of performance and density gains, and any modern all-flash array needs to be ready to take advantage. It plans to enable NVMe with tier 1 resiliency and enterprise data services for everyone, refusing to see it as expensive, exotic, high-performance niche technology.…

New wine in old bottles; NVMe fabrics can use Fibre Channel instead of replacing it

+Comment A walk through the vast and spacious exhibition arena at HPE Discover in London can bring you to Cavium's stand. There Roberto Angelo Polacsek, a senior account exec, will tell you why he believes NVMe over Fibre Channel will be important. Cavium bought Fibre Channel HBA vendor QLogic recently, and Polacsek says its 16Gbps HBAs can be upgraded to add NVMe fabric support, FC-NVMe, for free.…

Sets out 3PAR lures to stop hot data going to AWS, Azure

HPE is pushing its 3PAR Flash Now initiative to customers to buy 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage array technology starting at $0.03 per usable Gigabyte per month. It claims this is a fraction of the cost of public cloud alternatives.…

Kaminario claims you need scale-up and scale-out for full fabric access benefits

Interview NVMe adoption by array and storage software vendors is shaping up to be one of the single biggest transitions in the storage industry as the long-lived Fibre Channel SAN becomes the NVMeF SAN.…

Software-flinger improves security, integration with v6.4

If you're in the object storage game, you'd better ensure your kit has Amazon S3 functionality and security. Storage software flogger Scality is no fool and says it has improved both with its latest RING 6.4 version.…

HFS A-Series given pink slip, told to walk the plank

El Reg chats to Nimble man about coming wave of NVMe adoption

Analysis A sea change is gathering pace in storage, powered by NVMe drive-level and fabric-level connectivity, the two declaring war on data access latency, and combining to bring data closer to compute and get more applications running in servers faster.…

But while the all-flash kit sales are up, hybrid arrays are down

Analysis A considered look at Nimble Storage's latest quarterly results show that its all-flash array (AFA) sales are rising but hybrid product sales are falling, suggesting some cannibalisation is going on.…

Public cloud and Huawei cited among culprits

Analysis HPE's latest results show a company emerging slimmer and fitter through diet (cost-cutting) and exercise (spin-merger deals) but facing tougher markets in servers and storage – the new normal, as CEO Meg Whitman says.…

Analysis Wikibon's chief technology guy, David Floyer, has put out his top six disruptive tech tips for 2017, seeing that ARM and Open CAPI will separately grow at Intel's Xeon expense, the cloud at on-premises' Server SAN expense, and flash at disk drive's expense, while XPoint will be a 2017 dud.…

But world SSD shipments up 46%, 128-layer 3D incoming

The utter irrelevance of Seagate as an SSD shipper is shown by TrendFocus's estimated total SSD unit ship numbers for 2016's third quarter, with just 0.1 per cent of the 38.25 million units shipped, 46 per cent up on a year ago.…

Binary split Humpty SAN Dumpty logically put back together again

Analysis Dell EMC is working on fixing the increasing split between primary storage data on flash and capacity data storage on object arrays by logically combining them underneath a 2 TIERS software abstraction layer.…

The good, the bad, and the ugly rusty spinners revealed

Backup and cloud storage provider Backblaze’s latest quarterly disk failure rate table shows WD 6TB drives had an 11.31 per cent annualised failure rate in the third 2016 quarter, with Seagate 4TB drives spinning into the ground almost as often, with a 10.2 per cent rate.…